I'm the Director of Sportsimpacts and an Economics Professor at the George Herbert Walker School of Business at Webster University in St Louis, MO.
I've conducted research at Super Bowls, Final Fours, All-Star Games, Ryder Cups, and numerous Division I NCAA Championship events.
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Notre Dame football coach, Brian Kelly, may have been “devastated” to learn recently that another academic scandal was facing his football program.

But perhaps part of that devastation is the self-realization that he is partly responsible.

On Friday, it was reported that the Fighting Irish is investigating whether academic fraud was committed by receiver DaVaris Daniels (projected to be their best receiver), cornerback KeiVarae Russell (projected as their top CB), defensive lineman Ishaq Williams and linebacker Kendall Moore. The players are currently being held out of practice until the investigation concludes.

This falls on the heels of the 2013 season in which Everett Golson, the starting quarterback in Notre Dame’s 2012-13 run to the BCS National Championship game, missed the 2013 season due to academic dishonesty. He returns as the starter this fall.

One year is an anomaly, but two consecutive years of academic shenanigans is the makings of an undesirable trend.

On the one hand, as Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins stated during his Friday press conference, young people make mistakes. And sometimes, these mistakes happen outside of the immediate purview of the coach. Practically, it is difficult for the coach or athletics director to be all-knowing, all-seeing beings.

Additionally, it is true that Coach Kelly does have a track record of caring about his athletes’ academic performance. During his last year at Cincinnati in 2009, his Bearcats checked in with a 75% NCAA graduation rate and a 71% federal government rate, the only team in the BCS top-10 that year to surpass the 70-percent plateau on both lists.

Then again, the pressure to win at Cincinnati is not as strong, the competition they faced at that time was less fierce than what Notre Dame typically endures, and succeeding academically at Notre Dame is a bit more challenging than at Cincinnati.

As the CEO of the football team, Brian Kelly is responsible for the types of young men he brings into the program. Fair or unfair, at Notre Dame – more than perhaps any university in America outside of the Ivy League schools, Stanford, or Duke – coaches in all sports are charged with recruiting young men and women of high character.

For years, many pundits argued that Notre Dame was losing the football arms race because they stood firm on their admissions standards while other schools were more lenient when admitting student-athletes with questionable academic abilities.

Father Jenkins would be well within his rights to be extremely agitated over the embarrassment associated with his prestigious university’s connection with academic impropriety in two consecutive seasons within its highest-profiled team. Similarly, he has the right to be extremely disappointed in both his football coach and his athletics director, Jack Swarbrick.

Just as Coach Kelly is the CEO of Fighting Irish football, both he and Mr. Swarbrick are responsible for making sure that a message of zero tolerance towards academic dishonesty be strongly delivered to all student-athletes, the department’s academic monitoring staff, and related academic support staff assigned to the athletics department. Especially so in the wake of losing their starting quarterback last season for similar circumstances.

The other thing of note that doesn’t look good is the trend in winning percentage as it relates to these alleged instances of academic improprities. Before any of these players were impacting the Fighting Irish fortunes on the field, Coach Kelly’s first two seasons in South Bend produced identical 8-5 seasons in 2010 and 2011. Conversely, all of the presently implicated players and QB Golson were on the 2012 squad that reached the title game. Draw your own conclusions, but these facts don’t paint a great public relations picture. The evidence is not inconsistent with the conclusion that the program may have started placing greater weight on ability over character and academic qualifications when recruiting kids for Kelly’s third season at the helm.

Notre Dame is an excellent school, and in a competitive landscape where they are seen as the beacon of joint success in academics and athletics, I fully realize that their ability to remain athletically competitive is incredibly difficult when competing against some schools that don’t hold their athletes to the same academic/integrity standards.

But when you work at Notre Dame, you know what you’re getting into. You know the Notre Dame brand supersedes everything else, which is why it looks incredibly poor on both the football and athletic administration that this scandal would happen so soon after the wake-up call (i.e. Golson’s 2013 suspension) received the year before.

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